Note: The livestream on X went well last week, so I've decided until further notice to make it a weekly thing, every Thursday at 9ET. If you have a question or something you'd like me to discuss, submit it here.
How ideas matter and the extent to which they do are the kinds of questions that have always fascinated me. Both of my books can be seen as coming down on one side of related debates, taking a stand against "ideaism," or the view that there is a strong and direct connection between what intellectuals write about and what happens in the real world. Yet one should not read them and come to the conclusion that I believe ideas don't matter at all, as my analyses of civil rights law and American foreign policy are largely historically contingent. It is true, however, that the role of ideas as causal forces can, in certain contexts, be exaggerated by intellectuals. And even when we do find cases of ideas seeming to matter, to what extent are intellectuals just channeling mass sentiment or the wishes of concentrated interests in order to achieve power and influence? Think of MAGA populism, which clearly formed as a way to provide an ad hoc justification for Trump's instincts. Meanwhile, in the real world, his political success has overwhelmingly been a result of his personality and status as a celebrity.
When we study the ideas of an intellectual, we are often really studying a wider culture and the kinds of opportunities for status it provides. The ultimate impact of individuals often comes when they serve as focal points around which trends, larger movements, or instincts can coalesce. Marxism at its peak was the governing ideology of states that together ruled about a third of the global population. There are always intellectuals who use ideology as a means to increase their power and status, and there are always masses with base instincts rooted in envy and resentment. The historical role of Marx was to provide the justification for these groups to work together, give them a lingua franca, and be a mascot to which they could all pledge allegiance. Of course, one can't study the lives of Lenin and Stalin without realizing that these men took Marx's ideas very seriously, and it impacted how they behaved. At the same time, it's still very interesting that Mao Tse-Tsung, by some measures the most successful communist of all time, appears never to have read Das Kapital.
There's no single answer to the question of how much ideas matter, as it is going to depend on framing and vary a great deal across societies and different historical epochs. With all that in mind, I've been thinking quite a bit lately about why Arabs in particular seem to always be getting seduced by bad ideas, and how this fact has influenced the development of the Middle East over the last century.
I first came across Hussein Aboubakr Mansour when this tweet of his on sexual assault in Egypt showed up in my timeline (see also the followup. Reminder: X is still a great place to be exposed to new thinkers and ideas!). That led me to his Substack, where I found this fascinating essay called "The Hour of Liberation" on the impact of Nazi Germany on Arab nationalism, which post-World War II became the dominant ideology of the region but today only really exists in zombie form. The thing about the Middle East is that it seems, of all the major regions of the world, to be the one most hostile to classical liberalism. For the last several decades, most of the ideological energy has been on the side of Islamism. The main bulwarks against this poisonous worldview are currently royal despotism, and different groups of fanatics checking one another. But before that, what motivated Arab intellectual elites and mass opinion was a kind of nineteenth century romantic nationalism.
I had always thought that the historical connections to Nazism were accidental, based perhaps on a shared antagonism towards Jews and the British and little else. What Mansour's essay revealed to me is that the relationships and synergies were much deeper. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, for example, which has a modified swastika as its symbol, is part of the ruling coalition of the Assad regime today. It had a militia that fought in the Syrian civil war before being integrated into the national army in 2019. Arab elites looked to German unification as a kind of model, explicitly rejected individualism, and kept alive a romantic vision of nationalism long after it had died in the West the moment Hitler shot himself in the head [sic; mouth]. One branch of this thought, Baathism, was a completely homegrown ideology, and ended up taking over both Iraq and Syria. These events were among only a few instances where a revolutionary ideology that wasn't originally created in the West (i.e., Marxism) gained control over a state in the post-World War II era.
The ultimate question here to me is why are Arabs prone to accepting and promulgating such bad ideas? Moreover, is there some kind of deep collectivism in the culture that causes it to be horrified by the idea of individual freedom? Is there a biological component to the anti-liberal tendency, perhaps related to a long history of inbreeding? Or is all this historically contingent? Are Arab intellectuals and religious leaders themselves driving this process, or are they just channeling the only kinds of ideas that have any hope of gaining power in the culture they find themselves in? What is the role of Islam in all this, and what are we to make of the massive historical overrepresentation of Christians as Arab nationalist thought leaders? As an Arab who finds classical liberalism to be by far the most compelling political philosophy in human history, there's a personal component to these reflections. And given that we still find Middle East squabbles occasionally dominating American politics, such questions will remain relevant for quite a long time. Regardless, I'm convinced that there is something unique in Arab culture, at least when reinforced by Islam, that makes it particularly unsuited to building functional modern societies. The fact that the region was enamored by romantic nationalism before it fell for Islamism provides strong evidence of that.
With Mansour's permission, I've decided to share his essay here. Since it's paywalled at his own website, I'll only make it available to paid subscribers below too. If you would like to support his work and read more of his essays, you can do so here. I don't get the impression Mansour reaches the same conclusions about the ultimate roots of Arab dysfunction that I do, but I've nonetheless learned a great deal from his writing.
Republishing articles is something I might be willing to do for other Substackers who are producing particularly compelling work. If you're interested in me possibly sharing one of your essays, reach out and let me know.
"This is Berlin; long live the Arabs!" With this catchphrase, Yunis Bahri (1903-1979) opened his first German broadcast on the pan-Arab shortwave radio station on April 7th, 1939. Bahri, a figure who would later be wrapped in so much intrigue and myth, was a well-known Iraqi propagandist and journalist. He served as the primary host of the radio station of King Ghazi of Iraq before the former's death and Bahri's subsequent relocation to Germany in 1938. Described by some as an Iraqi "Lord Haw Haw", Bahri was "bawdy, funny, and exciting". He had a powerful, bombastic voice, proper Arabic pronunciation, and unmatched skill in quick-witted puns and snarky comments. Until the war's end in 1945, the Voice of Berlin would be a sensation in the Middle East, broadcasting religious sermons, political news, and mass calls for armed revolts, all shrouded in the intrigue of Nazism's supreme art of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and demagoguery. Arab sympathy for Nazi Germany, already at an advanced stage, became an uncontrollable mass phenomenon, and vicious hatred towards Jews, the United States, and Great Britain was firmly inserted into modern Arab mass culture at its birth. Radio Berlin became the first modern mass Arab media medium in the Middle East.
To the Arab audiences, the promises the Voice of Berlin made during the war were simple, "Jews will be driven out of Palestine; the French will be driven out of Syria; the Pasha class will lose power in Egypt in favor of the peasants; Germany will sponsor pan-Arab unity." "All these things are attractive to the Arabs and especially in Iraq." The German propaganda aimed primarily at "creating an atmosphere of distrust regarding the British promises" and providing German promises as alternatives. In Hitler's Directive No. 30, the stated core proposal of the Arabic propaganda campaign was that "a victory for the Axis will bring about the liberation of the countries of the Middle East from the English yoke and thus realize their right to self-determination. Whoever loves Freedom will, therefore, join the front against England." The hatred towards Zionism and the "Jewish menace" was the basic theme of the broadcasts, which included the evils of Jews all over the Middle East and the world, weaving conspiracy theories about the Jews of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Furthermore, the Voice of Berlin propagated the myth that world Jewry, the United States, and Great Britain formed together one major league of imperialist domination over the world from which Germany, unleashing its global revolution, would help the Arabs gain national liberation. Bahri was the voice that communicated all of this to Arabs. He read news items, translated Hitler's speeches, offered his commentary, and constantly told fabricated stories of Arab massacres at the hands of the Jews in Palestine and British attempts to mobilize a Jewish army to occupy the Middle East.
Even before the war, for many Arabs, especially in Iraq, Nazism held a mysterious intrigue with its aggressive German Nationalism and the magnetism of Hitler's personality in propaganda. ِAlready in the early 1930s, there were numerous native attempts to translate Mein Kampf into Arabic, sending Arab youth to Germany to participate in Nazi youth events, and banning The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, a 1933 French communist anti-Nazi polemic, from entering Arab countries. ...
Modern Arab?That's MY nomination for "oxymoron of the day".
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Nazi cultivated the Arab as a means of reaching the Persian Gulf are during WW2 and the oil they needed.
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